


“you didn’t have to ask.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [68]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Best Friends, F/F, Reunions, Siblings, if Rose was older, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23248045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: An illustrious pupil is to be introduced to Deepdean in MMU9, and it cannot be Rose Wong as the timeline doesn't line up. But... what if it did?Canon EraWritten for the sixty-eighth prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Amina El Maghrabi/Daisy Wells, Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [68]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 17





	“you didn’t have to ask.”

Daisy is looking at me. She looks at me a lot these days, with her curious blue eyes that stare like Alexander’s: as if she is used to staring at whatever she likes.

“What is it?” I ask her with a bemused sort of laughter in my voice, finishing off braiding my thick rope of hair and securing it with a hairband. I pushed it back over my shoulder and started fiddling with my skin. My face is speckled with spots, particularly the same one on the side of my nose, while Daisy’s skin is flawless with only two rosy spots on her cheeks. “You’re doing your thousand-yard stare right at my nose.”

“Nothing,” she replies in a perfect facade of plaid innocence (perfect to anybody but me, as I can read her face like a book by now) and picks up her letter from Bertie again. When I glance over, I see that the paper is covered with Bertie’s spidering scrawl, with his signature cramped in at the bottom with a kiss, and Harold’s swooping signature written underneath it, beside his small greeting to the two of us.

Fidgeting with the places on my face that display my uneven skin tone, patchy in places because of my acne, I turn to Daisy and say, “ _ Right _ . How’s Bertie?”

“Watson,” she says, reaching over to grab my wrist in a rather rough way as she pulls it away from my face. “Hazel. Stop it, all right? You look… you look pretty.”

I look at  _ Daisy Wells _ , staring at her baby blue eyes and beautiful fair hair, and I can almost believe the soft smile on her face. “Alright.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I almost do.”

Reaching out to take my hand, Daisy squeezes it lightly and says, “Better than yesterday.”

After our oddly quiet moment, Daisy releases my hand and throws herself back on her bed. “Oh, and about Bertie: he’s doing _brilliantly_ . You will  _ never _ guess what Harold is planning, according to George’s letter yesterday.”

A single phrase shot into my mind:  _ a proposal _ . At the image of Harold down on one knee in some dusty corner of Cambridge, I snorted a rather unladylike laugh. “Sorry, I just had a… a thought.”

“No, go on,” Daisy says, as she is ever more indulgent of my inner thoughts nowadays (that is, the minuscule percentage of the time that she doesn’t know exactly what I’m thinking, just like how I know her every thought). “You thought of a proposal, didn’t you?”

Our eyes locked in tandem of detective understanding for a long moment and I understood in an instant. “No  _ way _ !” I gasped.

“Why, what are we no way-ing about?” asks Amina El Maghrabi, skipping into our dorm and swinging around the doorframe. Although we all wear the same dreary grey uniform — grey pinafores or skirts, white blouses, ugly pullovers, and clumpy regulation shoes — Amina manages to make it look classy and fashionable, as if it belongs in a magazine, pride of place on the front page, posing like the most famous model. When she stops her graceful sweep of movement, she takes off her straw boater and skips over. “Oh, that plait is  _ good _ , Hazel! And  _ ooh _ , may I see that beautiful pin?”

Embarrassed at the genuine praises that Amina always showers me in — I adore how genuine they are but it does make me cringe on the days that I lack confidence in my appearance — I pass over the pin that Ah Lan gave Daisy and myself. “It’s both mine and Daisy’s, really,” I tell her, brushing my plait back over my shoulder in a very Daisy-ish way. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“It  _ is _ !” she says, setting it down on the top of my chest of drawers with immense care. Then her voice catches and I  _ know _ that it’s the gasp that leaps into her throat when she turns to Daisy. “Oh! Hey, Daisy!”

“Hey, Amina,” Daisy says, her voice inexplicably shyer from the moment Amina looks at her, and her hands instantly tucked together in her lap, pianist’s fingers twined together. “You look lovely today.”

“Thank you, Daisy!” she says and, noticing that Daisy doesn’t have her boater on yet, she places her own onto Daisy’s head. My best friend turns an interesting shade of rosy pink and ducks her head. “You look gorgeous, by the way, Daisy. Your  _ hair _ ! The summer sun really did it good!”

Although I do enjoy watching Daisy be flustered, I love her too much to watch her cringe herself into an alternate dimension. “Amina!” I say, forcing her to turn and acknowledge me so that Daisy can relax and stop turning increasingly redder. “I’ve heard some whispers from Clementine about a… ‘a new student’. Do you know anything about it?”

This instantly forces her to look back at Daisy, who has calmed down from her awkward fumbling and manages to stick up her chin in her typically confident way. “Oh! That reminds me.” Standing up, she offers her arm to me and says, “May I, Hazel?”

Incredibly curious by this point, I take Daisy’s arm and walk down the stairs with her, Amina bouncing at her side.

* * *

When I reach the bottom, I hear voices tittering in excitement as students crowd around a rather small figure standing by the doors of House and obscured by girls in Deepdean dress. Matron is trying to shoo everybody away, giving the new girl some space, but one question cuts through the gaggle as someone asks the question that everyone wants to be answered: “WHERE YOU FROM, FOREIGN GIRL?!” shrieks Betsy North.

A reply chimes out from the now silent crowd, a quiet voice that I know very well. “Hong Kong.”

“ _ Hong Kong?!”  _ I find myself gasping out, the most inadequate thing I could say in that moment, not with a piece of my heart from across the ocean standing across me, down four steps on the house staircase and across a threadbare rug the stretches across the hall.

My heart is divided into pieces, and I have never had it all in one place since the moment I became obsessed with England. Since before I arrived at Deepdean, a piece of my heart had been devoted to the idea of my absolutely English best friend, the obsession of finding my feet on dry land only growing as I slouched at the railing of a ship crossing the ocean to my own life, believing that the ground could never feel solid underneath my English patent shoes. That part of my heart has only grown since then, a third of the space in my chest devoted to Daisy Wells, just as she thinks of me.

Her heart is broken up in far fewer pieces (thirty-five per cent to me, thirty to Bertie, fifteen to Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy, a begrudging twenty-one per cent spread thin over Kitty, Beanie, Lavinia, and the boys, and a hesitant one per cent focused on Amina El Maghrabi), and I am proud to hold over a third of it in my hands. Another thirty-five per cent of my heart belongs to my sisters and Teddy, and Jie-Jie, my father and Ah Ma hidden away in the Hong Kong part of me and leaving thirty per cent to curl around Kitty, Beanie, Lavina, George and Alexander.

Here is a piece of my fragmented heart, standing in the flesh in rainy England, looking as astonished as I feel.

“Ying Ying!” Rose shrieks and she catapults herself across the hall in an utterly un-English way.

“Ling Ling!” I yell, rushing forward and sweeping her up in my arms. “Oh my  _ goodness _ !  _ Hóunoih móuhgin _ .”

“Long time no see too, Ying Ying,” she says in a thick Hong Kong accent, smiling up at me with her hands clinging onto my regulation blazer. “Su-pree-se?”

With a chuckle, I reply, “Surprise, Ling Ling. How did you manage  _ this _ , then?”

She giggles. “Daisy! She has been calling Father to help him organise it without you knowing.”

I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Surprise, Watson.”

With another shriek, I fling myself at Daisy and squeeze her as tight as I can. “ _ Thank you _ !”

Daisy leans forward and bows her head into the hair on the top of my head, laughing and laughing until we can barely breathe. “I love you too, Watson.”

Of course she heard my subtle  _ I love you _ .

Matron tuts and escorts Rose up the stairs, where she is bouncing and exclaiming and talking and — to my astonishment — exclaiming about how much she adores  _ me _ . I turn to Daisy, and then glance up to Amina, who is chuckling. “You look funny when you’re surprised.”

“Do you mind?” I ask as we walk up the stairs again, stepping a little away from Daisy to prompt Amina to step closer to her, looping her arm through my best friend’s. Daisy’s face turns an interesting shade of red and I chuckle. “Do you mind that she’s here? Rose?”

“You didn’t have to ask me that, Watson,” she says with an eye roll and a sigh. “If I didn’t like the fact that she was here, would I not have voiced it? Don’t I voice  _ everything  _ I think?”

I look over at her and Amina, and then I glance up the stairs to where I know my sister is having a strange initiation into English life. “Not  _ everything _ , Daisy.”


End file.
